RETURN OF COL. ROOSEVELT. 
441 
to the medical doctor at the English mission He expressed his glad¬ 
ness at finding the Catholics and Protestants working side by side in 
deepest Africa and doing such a splendid work. He had heard that 
500,000 of the natives are members of the Christian Church and that 
more than half a million of them can read and write the English 
language. 
When Roosevelt came down the Nile to the Lado Enclave at the 
borders of Belgian territory, it is said that all the wild rovers, hunters 
and poachers in the great ivory country of the Congo, sent a delegation 
to him, inquiring whether he would not join an expedition and be its 
chief. One of the remarkable and fascinating pictures that comes to 
the mind in the return of Roosevelt to civilization is his trip down the 
Nile. 
Surely no personage in history, not even excepting Napoleon Bona¬ 
parte, has ever brought to Egypt a more romantic and impressive 
personality. Here was a product of Harvard’s best culture, a ruler 
who had handled problems alongside of which the granaries of Joseph, 
the armies of Menes and the unrivalled cavalry of Napoleon were but 
as children playing with toys. One might have seen besides the sculp¬ 
tured walls of Luxor, a brown-faced, cheerful, vigorous man of fifty, 
quite unspoiled by world-wide renown and universal popularity, riding 
a camel and laughing and chatting with his donkey boys. Yet no great 
king who has ever ruled the Nile, and no powerful ruler who has built 
pyramids and erected obelisks has ever had one-hundredth part the 
power or has ever known how to wield that power so well as this same 
laughing, cheerful, bright-faced man. To everybody he seems to have 
been as affable as a young college graduate. To his old guide Cunning- 
hame at Khartoum, he gave both gifts and money. And to every one 
of the black untutored men who in patience and good heart had taken 
the white man’s burden across hundreds of miles of scorching plains 
and gloomy forests, he gave not only a kind and hearty farewell but a 
substantial financial reward. No wonder that the black men went back 
into the forest saddened at the loss of Bwana Makuba, the Big Master, 
who had followed them to the hunt, who had waded the streams and 
threaded the forest with as much primeval joy as any native warrior 
ever did, and who in all his relations to them had been the fair and just 
master, a man who would not impose upon them and who while he was 
with them, would allow no man to do them wrong. 
